Using PubMed

To get the best results out of PubMed, you should know what it is and what it includes. 

• PubMed is the National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s search interface to the MEDLINE database.
• Coverage is from the 1940s to the present and includes over 5600 journals from around the world in numerous languages.
• It includes over 27 million references to articles - not the full text - from medicine, nursing, basic sciences and related biomedical fields.
• Each reference is indexed or tagged with Medical Subject Headings. MeSH terms describe what the article is about, like a keyword.
• PubMed includes references that are still being published, so not all articles will have MeSH keywords.

Search results may be refined by using the limits in the left-side menu of the results page and by clicking on Choose additional filters at the top of the menu. The Limits options include publication date, languages, and age groups.

The fastest way to search PubMed is by using the Advanced Search feature.

Go to the Search Builder box

• Click the Index button to see a list of terms, if desired
• Click the AND,  OR or NOT buttons to add terms to the search box
• Repeat steps as necessary
• Click Search to run your query, or click Preview to see the result count of your query in the Search History section

​This tool will search for MeSH Terms that are relevant to the text you upload. You can use it to discover MeSH terms for an author's article to find similar papers or just load abstracts for citations.